What is an employee leadership development program?
An employee leadership development program is a strategic plan designed to help employees gain and develop leadership skills. When creating a leadership development plan it should be structured, long-term and personalized to meet the needs of the employee and the organization. In other words, you want a development program that can help your employees grow within your organization.
An effective leadership program will outline different learning objectives and activities that the employee will undertake in order to develop their leadership skills. This plan should be created with the employee’s skills in mind and how they can develop these skills to become an effective leader. The ultimate goal of an employee leadership development program is to be able to train employees for future leadership roles in the company.
Why leadership development is important
One of the best strategies an organization can take on to see continued success is to promote from within. When a company is able to promote employees into leadership roles, they not only keep the talent within the organization but also allow for business continuity.
Information and ideas can be a valuable asset to organizations and when you keep employees on staff for a long time, the business can continue to build on those ideas. Keeping the talent within the company also means that there is less time and money spent on training new staff if those employees take their talents elsewhere.
Leadership development is also important as having strong leaders is a great investment. With strong leaders, your business is able to grow and succeed. Businesses with strong leadership will have a good reputation, so recruiting new employees will become easier. Not only that, the quality of the candidates that will be applying is higher, meaning better innovation and higher production.
Core leadership skills
Before you can create a leadership development plan for your employees, you need to identify the types of skills a leader should have. These core leadership skills will help you create an individualized plan depending on the employee’s strengths.
Goal Setting
Being able to set goals is important for leaders as they need to be clear as to what the objective of the team should be. For leadership development, working on both long-term and short-term goal setting is essential to have.
Delegation
All leaders have to know when and what type of projects they should be delegating to others. As a leader, employees will have more responsibility and they will have to know how to delegate tasks so that they can stay on top of their work.
Decision Making
One of the skills that may need development within the leadership development program is decision-making. For employees who have had to do very little of this in their job, they will need to practice this skill. Getting those in the leadership development program to be in charge of certain decisions will allow them to gain this skill while still being under supervision.
Communication
Being able to effectively communicate with your team is an essential leadership skill. When preparing a leadership development program emphasis should be placed on developing these skills. Having improved communication skills will mean teams will be able to operate smoothly and independently.
Related: How to Create Effective Communication at the Workplace
Time Management
If a team leader has poor time management skills, so will their entire team. Having to deal with late projects or tasks not getting done is not something you want to do. Making sure those in leadership development have good time management will save you from having issues in the future.
Problem Solving
Solving problems is one of the essential skills of every leader. A leader must be able to troubleshoot if needed so that work can still get done on time even if the team runs into issues. Having problem-solving skills should be emphasized when picking candidates for leadership development.
Relationship Building
Leaders must be able to nurture relationships with employees. You want a leader that employees trust and that can get employees to work hard when needed. When creating a leadership development program try to pick employees who seem to have good relationships with their colleagues so that they can transfer this skill into a leadership position.
These core leadership skills should be seen in the employees you choose for development. If an employee lacks in a few, try to find ways in which they can practice the skills while participating in the leadership development program.
Four steps to creating a leadership development plan
Taking the following steps will help you create a successful employee leadership development plan.
1. Define Company’s Leadership Needs
Before you are able to create a leadership development plan you have to look to see if there are any gaps in the current leadership. For example, are any of your managers leading more than one team? If your managers seem overworked, that can be an obvious sign that you might need to create a leadership development program.
Also, you might want to check what type of future needs your company will need in terms of leadership. Perhaps, there is a team leader that is not far away from retirement and you want to make sure that the team stays strong once this happens. One way to do this would be to start training team members with the specific idea of promoting them into a leadership position once the current leader retires.
This type of strategy is also important for companies going through a growth phase. If the business is expanding then it can be very helpful to have a leadership development program that can keep up with growth.
2. Assess and Identify Talent
Once you’ve defined what gaps are in your current leadership positions, you want to assess your current employees and identify who might have leadership potential. You should look for employees that have shown interest in leadership and have the types of skills that would make a good leader.
Make sure not to narrow your search to employees with the highest performance as this does not mean they will be good leaders. Instead looking for employees that you feel confident in teaching and who are eager to learn. Also, employees who are able to take negative feedback and improve their skills are the types of people who do really well in leadership positions.
3. Develop Talent, Don’t Train
Instead of trying to train new leaders to do the job exactly as it is always done, try to develop the skills of your top talent. For example, if you are looking to do leadership development with a team member, start by identifying which skills they already excel at and teach them how to use these skills once they have more responsibility as a leader.
Also, if an employee you are doing leadership training with is lacking in a certain area, make sure they get to practice that skill before the possible promotion. If an employee has poor presentation skills, for example, allow them to practice this skill by getting them to run a few meetings. That way you can see their ability to learn new skills which will be needed in a future role.
4. Keep Talent Retention the Focus
When creating a leadership development program, focus on keeping the talented employees within the company. That means nurturing those who have shown interest in staying with the company long term.
Remember that people would rather stay with a company that will allow them to grow and provide a supportive environment, so make sure these two aspects are prioritized in your leadership development plan.
An example of this would be to offer one on one meetings to those who are participating in leadership development. That way you can check in with the different employees and make sure they are happy with the program. This also allows you to make the leadership development plan more personalized as you work towards particular goals.
Once you’ve taken the above steps you will be able to create a successful employee development program that will help your organization for years to come.
